


The Matt Murdock Anonymous Club

by Orockthro



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, POV Female Character, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 01:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6308848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Matt Murdock Anonymous Club. We’ll need shitty coffee next time, to make it official. Maybe have it be a weekly thing.”</p><p>(Set directly after the Season 2 finale, Karen and Foggy have a lot of things to think about.)<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Matt Murdock Anonymous Club

**Author's Note:**

> So, like many folks, I binged on S2 over the course of a weekend (oops). And then I had lots of feelings about the hella unresolved emotional arcs the show left us with. And so I wrote them down very quickly. Unbetta'd, so if you see something squirrely, let me know.

After Matt gives her the mask, pushes it into her hands like some sort of obscene gift, like a cat bringing her his bloodied kill, Karen doesn’t go to Josie’s. Josie wouldn’t ask any questions, no one there would, but for once, for the first time in a god damned year, Karen wants to be alone, if only for a little while.

She doesn’t go to her apartment. It’s still ruined, torn to shreds first by an automatic rifle, and then by men dressed in black with swords. There is nothing there that she wants to see, only violence she does not need to be reminded of.

She goes somewhere safe.

It’s two in the morning; even Ellison has gone home, and the only lights on in the office are the Christmas lights she put up around Ben’s windows. The ones that look a little like the lit-up chili peppers in stupid restaurant she and Matt went to on their first real date. Back when he was Matt Murdock and she was Karen Page, and she thought the biggest secret in the room was between her lips, not his.

She opens the bottle of scotch, throws the stupid Christmas paper away, and crawls onto the sofa, Ben’s sofa, and spends the night there. It’s cold, and she keeps her coat on, and she knows better than to drink as much of the scotch as she wants to. She doesn’t get much sleep, and when she does wake up, at 6 o’clock in the morning on Christmas, she stares at the words she wrote last night. Before Matt and his stupid paper bag with the mask in it.

She tries to imagine Frank Castle reading those words in the newspaper, or Matt listening to them.

They’re shit. Contrite. Empty and pitying. Matt’s mask, Daredevil’s mask, is still in her bag, wrapped in legal paper because she needed to be able to reach for her keys without seeing it.

She texts Ellison. “Don’t print it.”

He texts back a handful of seconds later. “Please, I don’t print first drafts.”

Then, after a minute, another text comes in. “Keep writing. And leave the office, for God's sake - it’s Xmas!”

*

Foggy opens his door on the second knock; he’s pale and his eyes are wide, and like her, he’s alone on Christmas.

“Where’s Marci?” She asks, when it becomes apparent no one else is coming to the door.

He blinks at her, and she realizes it’s only 7 o’clock, and he’s still in pajamas.

“Upstate, with her dad’s family, probably asleep. Like most normal people right now. Karen, what are you doing here?”

She chews her lip a little. She's only been to his apartment a handful of times; mostly they spent time at Josie’s or the office. The old office, she reminds herself. Not her new one. The old office that will forever smell like Matt’s blood, now, in her mind. Foggy’s apartment is cluttered in a comfortable sort of way. There are pictures on the walls, which is a nice change from Matt’s place, and there’s a fluffy rug at the door, littered with scuffed shoes. It’s homey.

“Can I come in?”

He looks beat. She amends the thought quickly. He looks tired. Matt looked beat. Beaten. But Foggy looks like she feels. Like her whole world has been dumped inside a cocktail shaker and definitely not stirred. He runs a hand over his face and rubs his eyes like a little kid, and opens the door.

“Of course. Sorry, the place isn’t very clean right now-- or ever, really. I haven’t exactly had time to... To do anything.”

She doesn’t care and tells him as much. She leaves her coat on the back of one of his soft and broken-in chairs, and folds herself into it.

“Are you, you know, okay?”

She shrugs.

“You want pancakes? ‘Cause I gotta say, I make some of the meanest cakes this side of the Hudson.”

“That sounds great, Foggy.” And for just a second, it feels like old times. Like a morning after a long and painful and perfect night out, with Foggy whipping up some weird recipe he claims is the best thing she’ll ever taste, and Matt telling stories about how he set off every smoke alarm in the dorm their senior year of undergrad.

Only they’re not camped out on folding chairs in the office with the fans on high to combat the heat and the smell of must in the walls, and Matt’s not here.

She goes and gets her bag, and while Foggy is cracking eggs into a bowl, she sets the paper-wrapped mask onto the counter next to him.

He sets down the whisk.

“Is that...”

The paper is stuck to it in patchy red spots, blood on legal paper in a way she supposes is borderline poetic. She doesn’t unwrap it, but Foggy does. He peels the edges away until it’s just two red eyes staring up at the both of them.

Foggy is white-faced, and Karen realizes too late that she ought to have told him first that Matt is alright, that he isn’t dead in a gutter somewhere.

“He’s fine. Or mostly, anyway. He gave that to me.”

Foggy snorts and runs a hand over his face again, through his hair, and bits of Matt’s blood flake off in his eyebrow. “Yeah,  _fine_. Nothing new there, then, probably just oozing blood from his pores. I take it he told you?”

She nods.

Foggy picks up the whisk and says, “Can you get me the milk out of the fridge?”

“Foggy...”

“What? Do you want me to break down? Do you want me to jump up and down because you finally know, because Matt finally did the right thing and told you? Nothing’s changed!”

“How can you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth, Karen. Nothing’s different. Nelson and Murdock is still closed down, you’re still working for a freaking newspaper, and Matt is still... out there. Being Matt. You know his secret, great. Welcome to my life. He’ll still find ways to keep other secrets, Karen. It doesn’t stop.”

“Is that the problem?”

“Yes! Yes, that’s the problem! You didn’t know him before all this, so you don’t understand--”

Karen pushes herself away from the counter, back straight and standing up taller than Foggy. “Don’t tell me what I don’t understand, Foggy. Just-- don’t.”

“He was my best friend, Karen. I’ve known him since I was nineteen, since I was a kid. I spent the last seven Christmases with him, and this is the first time since we graduated that...” He starts beating the eggs and dumps an unmeasured quantity of sugar into the bowl with his hands.

“You’re talking about him like he’s dead.”

“Yeah, well, the friend I had is gone.”

Karen reaches over and takes the bowl out of Foggy’s hands. He isn’t expecting it, and wide-eyed, he lets her. She hurls it onto the floor.

It doesn’t break-- it’s one of those indestructible plastics-- but the eggs and sugar and the flour he’d started to dump in all erupt out of it, slopping across the floor and the underside of the counter in alternating wet-dry splotches.

“What the hell, Karen?”

“He’s not dead, Foggy.”

“He--”

She stands her ground, the mess all around her. “Don’t interrupt me. He’s not dead. I know what dead is. There’s a reason I don’t go home for holidays, or why I don’t talk about my family, or why I came to New York without a single friend, and it wasn’t because of the food. I know, okay. And Matt? Matt’s still alive. He’s not _dead_ , do you understand me?”

Foggy swallows. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Just... Okay. I thought you’d be angrier.”

Her whole body shudders, and it feels a bit like shock. She’s been under enough shock blankets lately to know that it isn’t, though. Not really. “I’m plenty angry. I’m furious.”

He laughs. It’s not one of his better laughs, but it’s still real. “We’re so fucked up.”

“Yeah. Yeah we are.” And she’s laughing, too, and crying at the same time, and she goes to wipe her face but her hands are covered in sugar and butter and so she just lets it all happen, doesn’t hide it or cover her face, or do anything other than stare at Foggy and the mess on the floor.

The mask is still on the counter, a half-formed proxy of Matt between them, ugly and raw.

“The Matt Murdock Anonymous Club. We’ll need shitty coffee next time, to make it official. Maybe have it be a weekly thing.” He’s crying, too. Just a bit and a lot more dignified than Karen, but still crying. “You know why he gave you that thing, right?”

She shakes her head, even though it’s a lie.

“He wants your permission, or your damnation, or, I don’t know, your absolution. Fucking Matt Murdock and his complexes. Catholic Guilt, whatever you want to call it. He...”

Karen thinks back to her trite words, about heroes and mirrors. The lone vigilante. She wishes she could delete them completely, burn it all and start fresh.

“He doesn’t want to be alone, Foggy. That’s why he gave it to me.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while, but he does nod. “Come on,” he says. “There are towels in the bathroom. And I actually want to eat pancakes, okay, so don’t dump the next batch, too.”

They eat breakfast with shitty syrup that’s crusted to the cap, and Foggy turns the radio to Christmas music while Karen tries to write some words on her blank white screen.

Her fingers are stiff but she forces them to type anyhow.

_A hero is not born, a hero is made._

_In the wake of Frank Castle, we will all ask ourselves, ‘How did this happen?’ The news channels, the blogs, the conversations on the subway will all center around the question: was Frank Castle crazy. We’ll argue about whether he was right or wrong, how many bolts were loose from his head, and why he did what he did after the fact, as if it’s over. It's not over. And it doesn’t matter if Frank Castle was crazy._

_What matters is what_ we _did._ _And what we do from here._

_A hero does not exist in a vacuum. He has friends, family, people he passes every day to go out and buy his coffee. We are that hero’s neighbors, the people she passes in the hall, the ones who give her bus fare when she can’t find her wallet._

Her fingers still. There’s more to write. But it’s Christmas.

“Foggy? Do you think...”

He sighs. “I’ll call him. And I’ll make some more pancakes.”

She grins.

_Heroes are made. And we’re the ones who make them._

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!


End file.
